The Mandela Tree of Orchid Plaza

When Nelson Mandela came to the Singapore Botanic Gardens in 1997, the Gardens dedicated a tree to him, and they picked an unlikely one. The giant cola is West African, unlike anything else growing around Orchid Plaza, and it has stood there with his name attached ever since. An orchid was named for the same visit, which is the more Singaporean gesture. The tree is the one you can walk up to. Cola gigantea belongs to the genus behind the original cola drinks. Its nuts are bitter and loaded with caffeine, chewed across West Africa as a stimulant and offered to guests as a matter of courtesy, and almost every part of the tree has a use in traditional medicine: bark for swellings and pain, other parts against fever, asthma and whooping cough. Laboratory work on its leaf extracts has since taken an interest in the anti-inflammatory half of that reputation. It is not a giant here. Three and a half metres of girth and fifteen metres of height is respectable rather than startling, and it only joined the heritage register in 2014, seventeen years after the dedication. Nobody recorded when it was planted. A dedication is not a planting, so its age is genuinely unknown, and no record of one has turned up.